If you visit Japan, eventually you’ll see gashapon vending machines. They’re virtually everywhere, and a mind-boggling array of items can be obtained from them.
On our recent trip, one thing I got out of one such machine – for the princely sum of ¥500 – was this:
The ‘prizes’ are random, but this particular machine only had one thing inside. Here’s the contents:
And a detail of the device itself:
It’s a handheld video game called ‘Game Poke’! As you can see above, the instructions are in Japanese. But this is the Space Age and that’s hardly an obstacle any more:
Basic stuff really. The Rotate button allows us to ‘Bray the game’ (although it actually doesn’t), and the S/P button allows us to ‘game of the start or stop temporary’ (in actuality it does neither).
But who needs instructions?!? Batteries were included, so lets fire this thing up:
What’s this? This little Poke contains 99 games? The buttons allow you to select the different games, and there appears to be (up to?) 26 in total. However each game has variants as well, not to mention 99 (!) difficulties and a wide range of speeds. How much of these are actually different is difficult to tell, but there’s certainly an impressive amount of variety.
You can see it ‘fakes’ a larger display via a 10×20 pixel LCD display with status bar on the right. The LCD contrast is poor, with ‘off’ elements too visible, but there’s no way to reduce it.
The games themselves are, of course, abysmal. Consisting mostly of execrable pseudo clones of Atari 2600 Combat, unplayable ‘driving’ games and others that seem like pixels just randomly flickering on and off there’s just no way anyone would ever enjoy actually playing this thing.
But it does have (19 versions of) Tetris, and I’ll be generous and say they at least work. The device is speedy and the buttons are responsive and it even has a beeper for sound, but it’s extremely tiny and as a result very hard to control.
That’s a closeup of the status bar, which strangely features an awful caricature of a small Asian child (man?) who flaps his hands up and down endlessly while the unit is on. The scores themselves are virtually meaningless since it always and only increments by 100 regardless of game or what you do. I doubt anyone has ever cared about a score they achieved on this device.
Overall, to no-ones surprise – this is a terrible game machine. ‘One for the collection’, as they say, this will be stashed inside a box never to see daylight ever again 🙂
(Intriguingly I ended up seeing ‘Game Poke’ gashapon in a few places in Japan. On one of them a note was attached to the front explaining in English and Japanese that only one in five of the devices actually worked. The others apparently were fakes with stickers on their screens and intended solely as keychains. It seems therefore I got lucky?)